If there’s anything more annoying, as a Buddhist Studies MA student, than having to memorize lists of lists after lists full of lists from the annals of the ancients, it’s having to plow through the re-definitions of all those terms from the mouths of the moderns (is ‘anals’ a word?). This is not high scholarship. This is the business of busy-work, the intellectual equivalent of keeping that shovel moving to justify your union job, or to keep your position as the arbiter of privilege in the fan-boy chat-pages of Facebook…

Yet that’s what they all do, in the Western Lands, at least, and even in the temples, too, as if only one new definition ‘changes everything’, so that the Pali/Sanskrit word ‘dukkha‘ is no longer merely ‘suffering’ but ‘stress’, ‘anguish, ‘dissatisfaction’, or maybe even just ‘a spot of unpleasantness’ so easily resolved by following that Yellow Brick Road known as the 8FP, Eight-fold Path, when the reality is not so easy at all… (More …)

Yes, this is a dimension of suffering, more than the sum of your life, more than the breadth of this world, an entire dimension, or two, length width depth time and biology chemistry physics, at the very least, all conspiring to keep you within limits, physical limits, by a margin of maybe 51 to 49, you’re doomed, to a life sentence, paragraph, chapter and verse, complete with death, guaranteed, and there’s not much you can do about that, no matter what some sweet-talking New Age guru with his most articulate drugstore Buddhism tells you…

And then there are the joys, too, to be fair, to be honest, the joys of family, and communion, and art and culture and sex and first love, but still there will be last rites, and that is the point, and the Buddha knew that, fully and well, he not some party-pooper intent on spoiling the fun, just quite aware that for every count of fun there would be two of misery, in some cause-effect relationship, you can plot it on a graph, and call it the Four Aryan Truths, if you want, to be mitigated by the Eight-Part Path (please do not fold), which will not solve all your problems, but it’s a good place to start… (More …)

If I’ve learned anything in my life, ANY ONE SINGLE THING, it’s not to harbor resentment and ill will, and this can be done, with some practice and some diligence. There should be a better term for this in English-language parlance than simply ‘letting (it) go’, but then, that’s not exactly our specialty as a culture, now, is it? So I guess that will have to do. If every single moment of our lives is potentially new, then I guess we could thank the Christian tradition of confession for that, but meditation is probably better…

I used to invoke the ‘Three Times’ clause with a previous GF, so that once we repeated the same talking points three times in any given argument, then we should stop, invoke a period of silence, and come back to it the next day, if we could still remember what it was we were arguing about. We never could of course—ever. So my erstwhile GF should have loved me all the more for that little trick, right? Yeah, right…

… now read, an excellent guide to the subject with your characteristic blend of breadth, sharp focus and personal insight. In fact, you’ve inspired me to have a go tonight – the easy Maharishi version but usually slows me down effectively!

Haven’t you heard? Life is a popularity contest or that’s what it seems like to me, measured by likes, follows, shares and the results from the latest click-bait from the latest click-mills; whoever has the most likes, follows and shares pretty much wins, when all is said and done, and all the races have been run.

You get 1 point per like, 3 points per follow, and 5 points per share, or something like that, I’m not so sure, so I’ll have to talk to my accountant. Whoever gets the most points by the time they die will win, of course. What irony! You have to die to win! And to the victor go the spoils!

Just kidding! So all you click-bait entrepreneurs, please note: my jaw drops for nothing and I’m not easily impressed. But wait, hold the freakin’ presses! We’ve just received the latest news from above. Facebook is now about more than just casually ‘liking’. Now there are ‘reactions’: Like, Follow, Share, plus Love, Haha, Sad, Wow, and Angry!

That should be worth a few billion on the balance sheet. You still can’t ‘dislike’, though, of course, as that would unleash a horde of furies, but at least we can now nuance the subtleties of a certain displeasure without angering the powers that be… (More …)

Social media is the hippest coolest thing since hot bread, of course, leading many of us to wish and hope that this is the signal and symbol of our entry into a new economy of sharing and creativity. This is our generation, right? Nothing could be more welcome, right? There’s only one problem: it’s all b*llsh*t. This round of capitalism may be even worse than what came before, if that’s possible, the postures of Amazon, Air BnB and others well-known at this point.

What isn’t so often discussed is the individual’s role in all of this. Anybody who’s ever played the game called ‘FaceBook’, of course, should be familiar with the grade-school level of bullying and boasting that goes on there, under the guise of social media, but it’s even worse elsewhere. On FB, at least, you can always ‘unfriend’ someone or at least ‘block’ them from cluttering up your time-line and news-feed with their incessant insipid nonsense.(More …)

Facebook is a carnival midway, if you’re an oldster, or maybe a hippie fair, if you’re a boomer, everybody trying to sell something, mostly crap, but you never know, gotta’ get you off the pavement and into a cool room to discuss matters, like an Oriental rug merchant, sip some mint tea, and finesse that bulge in your pocket, the one that holds the money, not the one that wears the genes…

The Internet is Swiss cheese, Emmentaler, hardened and full of holes, going off in to other dimensions. FB is a 3-D medium, a surface like People magazine, all smiles and light, and an infinite number of worm-holes that you’re supposed to crawl down for a better view of the Matrix, the ads, the commercials, the dark hidden world of desire unrequited…

Likes: if you like a FaceBook post, or just want to piss on the tree to indicate you’ve been there, then firmly but gently click the ‘like’ button, indicated with a ‘thumbs up’ sign. That’s all you have to do. Like away, like all day, forget your house your spouse and your job, just sit there liking things to your heart’s content. We content providers will love you…

Share: now that is different. True, there’s a button there, very similar to the ‘like’ button, but it is in the form of an arrow, not a thumb. But there’s a bigger difference than that: it takes up space on my page, typically a large space, since most FB manipulators are much more ostentatious–and greedy with space–than I with my humble little blog here. This is especially important now, since the ‘share now’ option allows you one-click convenience, and FB’s own ads now take up half the available space… (More …)

I think I’ve cracked the code for FaceBook emoji stickers, doggie ones, that is: Mugsy is Muslim, sensitive about his dark skin, good-natured but quick to anger. Biscuit is Buddhist, devil may care, since there is nothing such, lovable if a little bit lazy, not a deep thinker but sensitive to the touch. Koko is Christian, a little bit of both, and something of a trickster, kick him in the butt and you’ll get a good day’s work…

I just joined a ‘Spiritualism’ group on Facebook last week, hoping for something more than the usual cat videos and pictures of everybody’s good ol’ granddad. It was pretty disturbing, frankly. First of all, ‘Spiritualism’ apparently not only does not include religion, but religion is outright forbidden, in fact. So I thought maybe my definition of ‘Spiritualism’ was imprecise, skewed if not screwed, but if it is, then so is theirs. They even use the term ‘ Spirituality’ interchangeably, so I definitely know what that means. Am I the only one who sees a clear connection between religion and spirituality? Duh…

Second, the leader of the group (“We are all one”) is apparently so paranoid and back-biting, that not only will he talk trash against a competing (!?) FB group (“they talk about religion—even politics”), that he will kick you out of his group if he sees that you are on theirs, too. Now that’s truly weird. That makes Scientology look positively Unitarian, if not Universalist. He makes it repeatedly clear that he can and will control the flow of info on his page in his group. If no religion is allowed, then I guess that leaves only New Age (fill-in-the-blank)…(More …)